New, pivotal tech revolution in the offing?

Consider: There was no market research in December 1980 when Apple went public that pointed to a pent-up demand in elementary schools for computers. Similarly, no one in 1990 foresaw demand for pocket-size devices to send messages and pictures, play games, take and watch videos. Now no one foresees what distributed supercomputing unleashes.

Steve Jobs famously said he didn’t look at what customers said they wanted, but invented what he believed customers should want. Hence Apple and many similar companies blossomed from the fecund Valley of Silicon, all doing something different with the radical technology.

And Reagan’s role in all that, back then? His magic sauce was that he stuck to his campaign promise to “get government out of the way.” A tsunami of jobs followed, which subsequent Presidents Bush 41 and Clinton were wise enough to let smoke through to Y2k.

When in 1985, Reagan awarded Jobs and Wozniak the new National Medal of Technology & Innovation, he cited President Hayes’ quip about the first telephone: “An amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one?” Exactly. He got it. Who could guess?

The rise of Distributed Supercomputing is big, bigger than previous cyclical tech booms. Let’s hope the next president and those following get out of the way. For college grads, real change is afoot.

Mills, a physicist, worked in the Reagan White House Science Office, is co-author of “The Bottomless Well” and writes the Energy Intelligence column for Forbes.